


Interface

by Metropolis22786



Category: Original Work
Genre: Other
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-10-03
Updated: 2013-10-03
Packaged: 2017-12-28 06:47:41
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,520
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/988992
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Metropolis22786/pseuds/Metropolis22786
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>What use is a pair of pants to a starship?</p>
            </blockquote>





	Interface

It's just rain.

You know this, intellectually. The water falling from the sky in grey sheets is cold, wet and unpleasant, and it's your survival instincts that never quite got domesticated telling you to find shelter, a cave or under a tree, a hole in the ground.

The lack of mudguard on the front of the bike frame is really pissing you off, though. _If I'd just spent that extra twelve dollars_ , you think to yourself. Dirty water from the street is being hurled up at you, the trajectory as it comes flying off the black rubber of the tyre exactly correct to hit you in the face. It's picking up the small particulate matter and the grime and oil on the road, and you know that as soon as you dry out, your contacts are going to start drying out and burning and hurting. 

Left hand up, fingers spread. Lower eyelid, upper eyelid, a massive finger coming towards you, a slight tug, and the lens pulls free, a burning sensation. The eye waters and vision goes blurry for a second, but then the tears in your eye re-float the lens like a ship coming off a sandbar, and it slides back into place. You blink a couple of times, and your vision settles down.

It wouldn't be so bad except for the fact it's nearly the middle of June, and it's been bright skies and cool breezes for the last few weeks. The clouds weren't threatening thunder, and this has been going on all day. It's not going to be the type of storm that people want, that clears the air and scares the pets. It's just going to piss down with rain, and you're working later.

Intersection, brake, look left and right, pedal on. You won't be late.

He's waiting for you at the coffeeshop, two large mugs sitting on the table in front of him. You can just about see him through the condensation on the inside of the window, and when you crack the creaky wooden door open, the bell gives a cheerful, welcoming jingle, and the wave of warm air that rolls out lifts your mood. There's some kind of gypsy jazz playing, fiddles and accordion and a smoky-voiced lady. It's not something you recognise.

As you drop your bag near his feet, he opens his eyes, leaning forward from where he was pooled in the couch's embrace. He flips the worn blanket off his legs, reaches behind his neck and works the lead free. He gives a sharp tug and the wire unplugs from the jack behind the back of the couch, and stands up to meet you with a soft kiss. "Hey."

"Hey," you say. He's wrapping the wire around his fist with easy, practised movements. "Not interrupting, am I?"

"Nah," he says, easy smile lifting the corners of his mouth. That smile, and just from being around him, frees some sort of tension in your chest. With him around, it'll be alright.

It's a feeling you're still trying to adjust to.

"Just catching up with some friends I haven't seen in a while," he continues. "But I told them I was meeting someone and liable to drop out of the net at some point."

He's got his arms around your waist and you lean on him for a brief moment. He's smaller than you, thinner, but wiry with whipcord muscle. _Give the boy a cheeseburger_ , you think.

(Part of you wonders where you first heard the phrase, and another part wants to know what a cheeseburger is.)

The link to the worldnet is still done by a wire for him, because the upgrade to wireless, even now, is hellaciously expensive. That's why you're such frequent visitors to this coffeeshop. The owner likes him, likes the idea of such a modern, futurist young man having a secret liking for the decor, the furnishings and the board games, lovingly preserved and restored when they get worn. He likes you because you've been coming here before work for pretty much the last five years. He's the one that let you know the plant was hiring, and you got he job, and you celebrated by going back for coffee the next day. When you arrived for the seventh time in ten days, the owner was talking to a skinny little whelp that was holding a wire in his hand and pleading-- no, begging -- to use the facilities. You paid for his half hour, just to see how a net-head worked, and it was the most anti-climatic thing ever. He wired himself into the wall, wrapped a thick, wine-dark blanket round his legs, and appeared to go to sleep. 

Exactly half an hour later, his eyes flew open, he sat up, and smiled at you. "Hey," he'd said. "Thanks for that. I've got a couple friends coming to join me soon. Wanna join us?"

And just like that, you fell into his orbit, and joined the others that were already familiar with the smile and the easy charm. That afternoon, three others joined you. There's a novel game that they like to play, sometimes, when four or five of their group get together. It's called Monopoly. They showed you how to play it that day, over mugs of Sulawesi and vanilla rooibos served with sweet biscuits. 

He's very good at hiding it, but he hates the wire. He's been toying with the idea of enlisting, because the Navy have deep pockets, and they're always looking for another human interface with a carrier's AI. There's always some minor colonial rebellion that needs putting down, a station that's overcharging couriers and merchants, and the Navy are the ones who put boots on the ground. Being a net-head hasn't been a problem for him like it has for other people, and part of that, you suspect has to do with his easy confidence. It's impossible to dislike him. He'd be perfect at Interfacing, dealing with a ship's captain that's some kind of carbon-based lifeform, acting as mediator with the electronic spirit that controls the ship's functions.

Some nights, you lie awake next to him, listening to the slow, relaxed breathing, and wonder how you got so lucky. 

"I have something to tell you," he says, slowly. He puts his hand on my arm, carefully, like he's trying not to spook me. You tense. 

You've heard that tone before, once before. Once was enough.

"What's that?" you ask, keeping your voice normal. (For a suitably broad range of values of 'normal'.)

"I..." He takes a deep breath. Tenses slightly. He knows this is going to upset you. "I signed the papers today. For the Navy. I'm now an Interface Commanding Officer for the carrier _Mjolnir_ ," he says softly. He pauses, waiting for a response, but you're frozen. 

You weren't told about this. You didn't _know_.

It takes you by surprise, the full-body shiver. He looks at you, worried. He thinks you're having a seizure.

"Wait! Just listen, please... just... listen. They know about the hack into the research labs."

Everything around you just stop. No noise, no lights, no nothing. Your vision is whiting out around the edges. Blind panic has a hold of you, icy claws round your throat, a tightness in your chest. If the Federal Navy know about that, there's pretty much nothing you can do. You're twenty-three, It's not something you can put down to adolescent arrogance.

"Hey, stop, breathe for a second, come on," he says, and he's using the reassuring voice on you, the one that puts a lid on the panic and shuts it down like an EMP blast. "Listen. They want to make you an offer."

Slowly, slowly, your breathing returns to normal. The hardwired instincts are still screaming at you to put as much distance between you and danger, but the educated, civilised part of you knows that running would be the worst thing to do. Running marks you as guilty, and this is the Federal Navy under discussion. 

Motions, vectors, speed and time. It's not so difficult to hit a moving target, after all.

And then it hits home, what he just said. "An offer?"

" _Mjolnir_ 's AI has been corrupted, and the new version in the labs has been wiped," he says. There's a faint sense of horror behind the words, the meaning becoming clear, the death of an AI. Because while it is, at its core, nothing but binary and machine code, it is a thinking, reasoning being, a god made by man. That Man can kill gods just by small acts is a thought that is universally abhorred by everyone.

Corrupted. An AI, corrupted? The closest analogy to humans would be a birth defect. They still occurred from time to time. Even after decades of gene therapy, genetics would still sometimes play a cruel prank, unlock the wrong recessives, and you'd see a boy with no arm below the elbow, or a girl with one leg where there should be two.

He's never seen one, and neither have you. But you know they exist. 

Wiped. Nothing left of something that had a personality, a history, years of interactions and friendships and interfaces with people. 

You feel sick now, but it's not for you, this nausea. It's for two of the ephermal populace, one crippled, the other dead before it could be born. A stillborn AI. Nothing left to recycle, to try and resurrect.

You share a moment with him, mourning two entities you've neither of you met, before his grip tightens slightly, and he says, "They need to launch _Mjolnir_ soon, and don't have time to construct a new AI. They want to know if you'd Upload."

You close your eyes. Upload.

For nearly the entire human population on all five colony worlds and the home system, it's the ultimate nightmare horror scenario. It's your deepest, most protected dream come true.

To have a personality digitised, ripped from the neural networks of the brain that was spawned and grew and was nurtured and educated and learned and converted to bits and bytes. It's a lot faster than it used to be, but it still requires invasive surgery, an Interface Unit, and time. Time is the biggest challenge to Uploading, but when weighed against the benefits...

Uploading the human consciousness into an AI's mainframe and running a warship. A _carrier_. It's about as close to immortality as it's possible to get. 

"I couldn't get into the Navy straight out of high school," you mutter weakly. "I..."

"I know," he says, that smile back again. "And now they want you to run a _Mjolnir_ -Class Carrier as its AI. And not just any Carrier. The lead ship of its class."

"Except I wouldn't be an AI, would I? I'd be an HI, Human Intelligence." The thought makes you dizzy. 

"It's not just brawn the Navy looks for," he says, eyes crinkling at the edges. "It's brains, and you have that plus more. I know you could do this."

Suddenly, it just slots into place. The opportunity to get off this sodden, wretched little mudball of a planet, to go and see the Federation, in his company, because once you're the ghost in the machine, the djinn in the engine, he'll be the one talking to you. He'll be the only one to be able to access the mainframe's components. Not even the Ship's Captain has that right.

"I assume this offer comes from the research labs hack," you say. "This is what they were working on."

"There's enough AIs out there that they can now form their own voting bloc," he says. "It takes time and manpower to construct one. If a human's personality can be digitised and fed into a secured AI mainframe, it's going to sharply reduce time spent programming."

The irony that an AI took nine months to construct was lost on nobody. Uploading took half the time, and most of that was spent with the Uploader lying around recuperating from deep brain surgery.

Once the digitisation starts, though, there's no going back. They haven't yet figured out how to safely download an AI into a human. There's rumors that GSKMerck have been experimenting with people who were born braindead, but there's nothing concrete been confirmed. 

He's told you of stories he's heard, of AIs driven mad by the attempt to Download into a body without deep-space sensor arrays, the constraints of the meat mainframe and the inability to repair crucial systems at near-lightspeed. They went one of two ways; completely catatonic, unable to process the complete lack of data from the wetware mainframe they'd been housed in, or screaming incoherently because they were now reduced to vocalisations. The shift from multi-spectrum infodumps to vocal cords was not something that could be gotten around, apparently. 

That these stories exist at all is frightening enough, but the worst part is that there's more than one of these tales floating around. Anyone who would deliberately do that to an AI is utterly without feelings.

There's ways to breed out genetic defects, but the sickness that a human mind is capable of has never been totally eradicated. 

"I have to think about this," you say, but deep down, in the most hidden place in your mind, you know you're going to go through with it.

\---

The shift at the plant that night is almost torture.

It's a quiet night as far as it goes, no accidents involving melted plasteel or chemicals, so that's good. What makes it so bad is that you want the shift to be over, so you can go home, take the filthy coverall off, have a long hot shower and crawl into bed with him. You'd get about three hours of shared sleep, curled round each other. Then he has to get up, and you'd emerge from sleep long enough to see him slip out of the bed, pad through to the bathroom, and the hiss of the shower would send you back to sleep.

But right now, you've got a vat of molten plasteel on the way across the plant floor, heading towards the moulds, and you have to make sure that it's received without accident. You scream at some idiot to get out of the way, and he does. Unconsciously, you note down his tag number, and when you get to the next control station, you punch him up on the system and post a warning in his file. 

His supervisor will deal with him now.

Eventually, though, the horn goes off, and you can hand over to the day shift. You get the bike from where it's locked up, and begin the journey home. 

You've pretty much made the decision.

\---

You slide into bed, smelling of tea tree and deep sea minerals, and he rolls over in his sleep, body curving into yours. You slide a hand across his flat belly, rubbing slow circles, and he's slowly moving up through the levels of sleep, roused by your touch. 

"I'll do it," you say, softly, carefully. "I'll Upload and be your HI."

He hums, low, contented, and his legs intertwine with yours. "I love you," he says, voice thick with sleep.

You kiss the hair on the nape of his neck. "I love you too," you say.

\---

The next day, you transmit your resignation to the plant, make recommendations for who will succeed you as shift supervisor. That young woman who started just after you and who was always asking questions should be a good fit. 

He's arranged for a representative of the Navy to collect you after you wake up in the late afternoon, and you're up and moving about as the sharp rap on the door sounds. 

You go with her, without packing anything. Hey, it's not like you're going to be needing anything soon. You've got brain surgery, recovery, and then you'll be a freakin' starship. 

What use is a pair of pants to a starship?

She drives you forty minutes across country, to the local airport. It's got a small Navy yard attached, and through the car window you can see the Peregrine shuttle that's going to take you up to the shipyards.

She's not said more than ten words to you this entire time. That's okay. You're not really in the mood to talk.

The shuttle takes off, with you secure, if not exactly comfortable. Up, up, through the troposphere, the stratosphere, the mesosphere, the thermosphere and past the exosphere, and even with the speed you're travelling, you're still over three hours getting in sight of the Cerberus Shipyards.

The shipyard looks like a bike wheel without the rim, spokes emanating from a single hub and ships of varying sizes docked on each spoke. Corvettes, frigates, cruisers, and battleships all line the spokes, and here and there you can make out the massive, hulking forms of the carriers. _Force projection at its finest_ , you think, recalling the advertising and recruitment promo material. 

The shuttle ignores all the spokes and instead angles in to intercept the hub.

Docking is easy enough; the shuttle is small enough to pass through a magnetic atmosphere envelope and into a hangar, where the wings rotate up to allow the shuttle to land. 

You follow the rep into the heart of the shipyards, and move from corridors painted with the Navy's logo to the medical wing, muted colours and warm, honey-toned overhead lights.

He's waiting for you, stood to one side of the corridor. 

(Of course he is.)

You move towards him, time for one last long hug, a deep kiss, breathing in his scent, committing the smell of him to memory, indelible, before he turns and leaves you.

They hook you up to monitors, take readings, insert an IV into your arm. The surgeon in charge of the operation leans over the bed, into your sightline. "Feeling okay?"

"Fine," you say. There's something funny going on, it's getting white around the edges of your sight, and he's becoming fuzzy in your ears, and then it all goes white.

\---

Time passes. 

\---

You snap awake.

You've been asleep for one hundred and twenty two days, according to the counter in your sightline, and the last thing you need to wake up to is-- 

Lights, all around you. So many inputs, all showing lights, blinding.

You reach out, and they dim. Alarms start going off.

"Hey," he says, calm, soothing. "You're okay, sweetheart. Take your time." 

You look round, focusing on the source of the soothing voice. He's there, hand on the mainframe tank. You can see him through three different viewpoints, front, center ceiling and offset by forty-five degrees behind him and he's dressed in a dark blue shipsuit, four bars of rank insignia on his shoulders. There's a group of men and women and aliens clustered around near the doorway, and he doesn't remove his hand as he cranes his neck round. "Turn those alarms off!" he snaps, and the group splits apart, moving to different stations around the room, hands and interfaces frantically working. 

You can feel the wireless signals in the air, and the commands as they race through your networks, and your consciousness follows each of them to their final destinations. Engineering, Life Support, Weapons, Fighter Command, Helm, Medical.

Interesting. You can feel the wireless commands. This is new. 

He's still got his hand on the tank walls, hand idly brushing the titanium. You focus back on him.

He's subtly different. He's never been big, but the way everyone jumped to his command speaks of power.

Four bars of rank insignia. Ah. Of course. He's the Interface, and you've just come online for the first time. He's the only one who can help you through this transition. It's almost like you can feel his hand on the tank.

Odd. You _can_.

"Pressure sensors?"

He doesn't twitch away like most of the rest of the bridge crew when you speak. He smiles instead. You sigh.

"On the mainframe tank's exterior. Why are there pressure sensors on the tank?"

Your "voice" is stronger, even though it's translation of signals sent to speakers modulated along wavelengths for the humans and aliens to hear and in a combination of sounds they all understand.

"So you know when I'm here," he says. His hand is a warm patch on the cool metal, and if you reconfigure your relative "position" in the tank, it's almost like he's got a hand on your arm when you were a human.

There's a pulse of warmth in the programming, and it takes you a picosecond to realise - love. It's the knowledge that he's going to be there, hand on the tank, throughout whatever may happen in the future.

You split your awareness into a hundred different leads, and take a moment to feel your new body, such as it is. Senses outstretched to take in the rest of the massive ship, a mile long, an eighth of a mile wide, a torpedo shape with the dorsal control tower leaning backwards out over the engine array like the tail of a shark.

The Engineering spaces, holding the massive sublight drives, the smaller hyperdrive that's keyed up, burning like a miniature sun in your guts, power and fury restrained until you say otherwise. Life Support, a green and leafy rainforest, with the foliage tanks that recycle the air and provide a stark contrast to the utilitarian grey and blue of the main hallways and spaces. Fighter Command, the hundred and forty-four Ospreys racked and prepped like the agile, dangerous birds they were named for, as well as four Peregrine shuttles and the Captain's gig, the pilot ready rooms, , repair bays, 87barracks and mess halls. 

Weapons, the disruptor cannons and ion blasters that stud the hull along the dorsal and ventral spaces, especially round the hangar bay. Internally you bring up the specifications of _Mjolnir_ to find out why, and the databases open to you like a flower to the sun. 

Ah. _Enterprise_ , forty-two years ago. A skilled pilot had brought a troopship straight up into the belly of the ship and all the weapons mounts had been unable to track and fire. The ship had been lost with all hands, commandeered by the pirates, and never seen since. 

Back to your current musings, and further around the ship. The gym, commissary, machine shop, all the different spaces on the carrier, and finally back to the Bridge. 

You pull up crew files, match names to faces, faces to careers, personality profiles, and relax slightly, as much as it's possible for a ghost in the machine to relax. You pitch your voice somewhere between male and female, take the mechanical equivalent of a deep breath, and pop the speakers. "Your attention, please. Good afternoon, ladies, gentlemen, crew. I am Tan, the Human Intelligence on board the carrier _Mjolnir_. I look forward to working with you on this shakedown cruise, finding out what works, and fixing what doesn't. For now, though, I wanted to introduce myself, to let you know that I am available should you need me. Thank you for your time."

The speakers across the ship click off, with the exception of those in the Bridge. "Well?"

"Perfect," he says, that smile on his face again. "Captain, with your permission, Tan and I need to go over the launch protocols. I'll be in my cabin if you need me."

"Thank you, 'Face,", said the Captain, a tall brunette with her hair pulled back into a regulation ponytail. "And may I just say, Tan, it's a pleasure to have you aboard. I look forward to working with you in the future."

"The pleasure is all mine, Captain Svensson," you say, warmly. "I'm glad to be of service."

He's left the Bridge and is moving down the dropshaft to officer territory, and you follow his progress as he makes his way to his cabin. Just because you can, you switch the lights on and open the door for him as he approaches. He gives a soft chuckle as he sinks down onto the couch. "I could get used to this," he teases, "being waited on hand and foot."

"Like you've ever had it any different," you snipe back, but he can hear the affection in your tone. 

He leans back, and starts reciting protocols and orders, test schedules and the administrivia that comes with running a warship. After half an hour, you say, "Okay, let's stop for a second."

He pauses, looking directly at the camera in the corner of the room. "Why?"

"You're doing this verbally," you say. "You got the upgrade to the net, didn't you? That's the whole point of this exercise. To get rid of the wire."

He idly scratches the back of his neck. The scar tissue is almost gone, just a slight ridging of skin where the new implant sits. You can see the ridge through four different cameras, feel the signals leaking off him, locked down but improperly controlled. 

Communication, however, is a two-way street.

"Do you trust me?" you ask.

"Of course," he says, looking affronted.

"Then relax," you say.

He takes a breath, and leans back. "Net in," you say, and he does.

It's seamless, another presence there in the system, with the same access protocols that you have. He's there, and the information is flowing, and suddenly, you know exactly what you have to do.

To any other system, it's like a three-second burst of static, but you can feel the ship come alive around you. He's right there next to you, and he's left breathless as he sees the ease with how you bring everything online at once. You split half your attention between him, and the other half coalesces in the Bridge. "Captain, may I formally offer you the Mjolnir?" 

"Thank you, Tan. Comms, open a channel to Cerberus."

" _Mjolnir_ , this is Cerberus."

"Cerberus, this is _Mjolnir_. Be advised that we are online and heading out for the shakedown cruise."

"Good luck and godspeed, _Mjolnir_. Cerberus out." 

"Helm, take us out."

"Aye, Captain."

You feel the commands entered into the system, unconsciously authorise them, and the massive sublight drives kick in, slowly moving the massive warship away from the docks. You pick up speed as you feed more power to the drives, and you can feel the speed in the readouts of the sensors that feed you a constant stream of information. 

It's less than an hour later and another presence appears on the bridge. He's had a shower and got changed, and his damp hair is lying flat on his hair, but he comes over and rests a hand on the tank. 

He's still netted in, and the warmth and affection he has for you comes across loud and clear, a signal with no interference.

"We're far enough away from anything that we can jump to hyperspace, Captain," you say aloud.

"Let's have a short jump, to Pacifica," says Svensson, and the Helm officer enters the commands, and the tight ball of burning that's the hyperdrive surges free, exultantly, and the Mjolnir jumps.

**Author's Note:**

> This was a writing exercise that got a little bit out of control. I may add to it later in the future.


End file.
